Slashdot Mirror
Inside the Failure of Google+
An anonymous reader writes: An article at Mashable walks through the rise and fall of Google+, from the company's worries of being displaced by Facebook to their eventual realization that Google services don't need social hooks. There are quotes from a number of employees and insiders, who mostly agree that the company didn't have the agility to build something so different from their previous services. "Most Google projects started small and grew organically in scale and importance. Buzz, the immediate predecessor to Plus, had barely a dozen people on staff. Plus, by comparison, had upwards of 1,000, sucked up from divisions across the company." Despite early data indicating users just weren't interested in Google+, management pushed for success as the only option. One employee said, "The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off." Despite a strong feature set, there was no acknowledgment that to beat Facebook, you had to overcome the fact that everybody was already on Facebook.
Biggest detraction was the unknown of how much of your browsing and searches and youtube video history would end up on your public profile. :)
Ambition is one thing, but ignoring reality is something completely different.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Media of all kinds pushes, and has pushed Facebook. I have almost never heard any celebrity, actor, "news" caster, etc.. say "G+" in a positive context, only negative as in "nobody ever uses it" or "only tinfoil hatters and basement dwellers use it."
Media made Facebook by doing just the opposite. "follow us" is still heard more often than "visit us at our site".
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
They tried to sell Google+ as exactly that, Google PLUS a social network. They should have made a social network that used Google's infrastructure instead. Classic Microsoft-style branding blunder.
Media doesn't want people switching because then they have to spend money on G+. They already spent marketing dollars on Facebook. Why would they want to waste that investment?
Attempting to force people into it via other services really pissed off the early adopters, who then chose to say "fuck it". No early adopters evangelising it meant it was DoA. Furthermore, the launch coincided with canning popular services, adding to the expectation G+ would eventually get the boot down the road.
There was never any room for Plus. instead of recognizing a subset of users who enjoy social media and offering a better product, Plus focused on offering the same product. Then, when it didnt become an instant sensation, they threw a tantrum and made all users social media users by embedding Plus into everything that google did.
In addition to this, the UI was an erector set of cobbled together ideas from the thousands of people from different divisions that included aspects of facebook, myspace, and google search. intuitive features were buried in dropdowns and posts were, almost childishly, colour coded.
Good people go to bed earlier.
To me, Google+ was the social network for your one friend who refuses to use Facebook.
Since every social circle only has one of these people, perhaps two at most, there was never enough of a critical mass for it to gain relevancy.
Unfortunately, the real problem is that social networks are very much silo-ed places, so its not really practical to combine more than one of them into anyone's feed of interest. Thus, if one person uses Facebook and the other uses Google+, they're not really going to interact in a convenient fashion.
A key question for communities that have migrated to G+ is where they're going to move to. If Google's other de-emphasized products are any indication, G+'s days may be numbered.
That is all.
The thing that distinguishes G+ is circles, which is actually a terrific idea. I have very little use for Facebook, but I use G+ for non-public communications quite regularly. (I won't call them exactly private, since the communications are still being mediated, and archived, by a centralized social network.) However, as with many other examples of technology, technical superiority doesn't mean much of anything with respect to widespread adoption. Facebook is the de facto standard, even if it sucks.
For me, and I would hazard to guess quite a few other people, the thing that makes G+ useful is that it failed to be adopted as a social media standard. I'll miss it when they finally turn it off.
unlike facebook which started as a way for people to keep in touch and talk about real life things. i got into G+ during the beta and even then the evangelists that google had hired were telling new users to follow all the blogger celebrities like Scoble instead of using the service as a social platform. and then you had the idiocy of making people care about migrating their photos from facebook to G+
They are stating what everyone knew over a year ago.
I freakin' hate it. The only reason I have a G+ account is to rate apps in the Play Store.
... from a friend who never sent them.
No, everybody is not on Facebook; rather, FB is a people vacuum cleaner.
And they strike deals with many companies. I bought a SIM card and discovered I'm on FB by the name Bobson (actually it's another name, I changed to protect the innocent).
For others who never heard of this website--------->>>>> "Facebook is an online social networking service headquartered in Menlo Park, California..... After registering to use the site, users can create a user profile, add other users as "friends", exchange messages, post status updates and photos, share videos and receive notifications when others update their profiles"-wikipedia
Could have explained this in the summary.
Allow anonymous users.
Instant success.
Sit back and watch Facebook turn to #2 in social networks.
It's really that easy.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Your company made profits selling ads. Other "social" media did too.
So instead of us being treated like live stock at company A we're considered live stock at company B.
Wooo! I'm so excited. I'll change in a heart beat.
PS: I'm not on facebook either.
To create a multi-billion user social network
They have to first change that big fat default header image that comes with every page for me to even remotely consider using it .
A whole bunch of brogrammers at one office were on it, which made it stink even worse. I already know these people through work, I don't need a whole echo-chamber full of them.
That was always the problem that myspace and then facebook were able to leverage, they got pretty young women on there early. I know that might sounds sexist, but young men go where the pretty ladies are, and if you add those two groups up it's usually interesting enough to pull in a whole lot of other people.
.
google+ never had enough users to reach that critical tipping point, in spite of google trying to add users by requiring google service users to be google+ members.
(for the kids in the audience, Dr. Metcalfe was one of the co-inventors of Ethernet.)
"there was no acknowledgment that to beat Facebook, you had to overcome the fact that everybody was already on Facebook."
"There was no acknowledgement [...] the fact that," this is pretty close to stating an opinion with loaded language. I have other opinions I'd feel equally welcome to state given the lack of supporting evidence in this discussion, so while I've no evidence of my own I'll just launch into my opinions because I think TFA's are garbage:
Google squandered their trust advantage over Facebook, which was the only thing that would induce anyone to switch
G+ is uncool
The bad management not only made concrete bad decisions, they amplified the worst parts of Googler ex-Ivy-League character: self-aggrandizing delusion, entitled bossyness, and s
In early 2013 I had an idea to make interacting between social media sites a little bit more seamless. So I started hunting down the google plus API (in addition to all the other popular social media sites at the time). The google plus API was by far the most anemic. To say it was even a serious API is misleading.
I was able to hunt down a Google engineer and speak with him in a slightly non-corporate exchange. Basically, they seemed to have no interest in apps or extending the site. The site is the site, no more no less. A few publicist type conglomerates could have access to a private API that let them manage their celebrity and corporate profiles from a single piece of custom software, but mere mortals only had the extremely basic API. I just did a quick search and it looks like nothing has changed since then.
Ever since that exchange I realized Google had no grand plan for Google plus and even in early 2013 was already on life support.
Google+ "rose" at some point? When did this happen? I must have missed it.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
I'm that one friend that refuses to use Facebook, but only because everyone I know in real life is too boring to follow.
I use Google Plus like it's Advanced Twitter, following people and projects I'm interested in, with the added benefit of not having to deal with rejecting friend requests from everyone I know. It's the best antisocial network there is!
I don't know about you, but I really love Google+ not for its social features, but for the fact that hangout offers free phone calls in the US and Canada... It put me out of trouble when I was traveling and my phone did not have any network. I could still call and reserve bus and plane tickets and hotel rooms using Google+.
Can Facebook do that ?
No.
Circles was a great idea. Google should have made plus a very lightweight site with circles and a couple of other features and an amazing API. Let the developers do the work for you. At that point, everything is sorta opt-in. No privacy issues. If I don't want my plus profile to have pictures, I just never download a picture app.
Google's name is too tarnished with regards to privacy and will never be able to launch a social media site again. It's like McDonald's trying to launch a health food line. About all they can do at this point is a spin-off type company that is far far away from the Google name.
You don't need social networking for your apps, but you do need identity management. You have to log in.
That login is incredibly important. It's a pain in the ass for every site to implement their own identity management. It's really hard to do well, and developers would rather focus on the site/app's usage after the user has logged in.
So there's a weird overlap between Facebook and Google, even though they serve very different purposes. Both have become practically universal, and increasingly, sites are leveraging their identity management platforms. Facebook's ubiquity meant that Google risked losing their edge there. Can you imagine the point where Google says, "Screw it, we're just going to let people link their Google Docs to their Facebook account"?
Privacy advocates go nuts about that, of course, but a large swath of users are perfectly content to have the improved simplicity of just pressing a button to sign in to something once they've verified their identity to the device. It enables all kinds of evils, since your eggs are now all in one basket, and even a company without evil intentions is going to profit off being able to peek in the basket. The right tech can limit what information you're sharing, but Google and Facebook knew all.
Both Facebook accounts and Google accounts are ubiquitous, and if anybody could dislodge Facebook, it was Google. Facebook took it seriously, and they really upped their game to prevent G+ from taking over. The advantages G+ offered were slim. They tried to market it with better privacy, but few people want to work that hard. It attracted a bunch of privacy nerds, and nobody wants to be social with them but other techies.
Google wasn't ready to manage identity. They didn't offer any real advantages for it. People seem to be content to manage two identity management platforms when needed; we've been trained to think that having dozens of passwords is reasonable. I believe they could have succeeded if they'd gone to the next level, making Google Wallet really ubiquitous. Facebook's feature is rudimentary. Pay systems on the Internet still suck. But Google wasn't ready to pull that feat off, and people just didn't need a second social network when they had one they were happy with.
I remember back in the day when I got a Facebook account, the colleague next to me asking: so what is this Facebook thing all about? Not very many people had heard about then. But for those family and friends that had, it was a great way to keep track of everyone (staying updated without, you know, actually engaging in social activities like phoning or e-mailing or meeting up). Which was great from the introvert standpoint. Back then, not much thought was spent on the more sinister intelligence-gathering capabilities. Ads were not really obnoxious.
Then it slowly, very slowly, turned up the frog heat. Today it is a place where the few social updates that you are still interested in, are buried between reams of mindless meme reposts, ads in which you have not the slightest interest, and algorithmic down-prioritisations.
Be the time G+ came along, I guess a lot of the more tech-savvy people had become clued-up and wary about the data-collection. I for one didn't want to give more data to yet another company, and strenuously declined to enter details, or use a G+ profile to log in to any of the few other google services I used. I also linked-out, have never twittered, instgrammed, whatsapped etc.
Giving people back a non-data-farmed, non-ad-soldout experience would have needed to be an indispensable part of their required killer feature set. But that of course didn't serve their purpose.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
I expect Google patented the hell out of if to keep Facebook from implementing something similar. Be nice if they'd let that go so Facebook users could use them.
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
The name thing was a huge deal-breaker for a fair number of people, and the pathologically horrible way they handled it made it a lot worse. I know dozens of people who would have used G+ but walked away from it because at least one person they knew had bad experiences with it. I spent months with my G+ account in various kinds of limbo because the "appeals" process for name decisions was completely dysfunctional. I eventually ran into someone on slashdot who knew a person who knew a person who could unstick my account and get my name approved, but by that time everyone had lost interest.
And one of my friends used to have a Picassa account, and then somehow it got marked as a G+ profile thing (even though she never intentionally activated G+), and then suspended because their algorithm thought the name was unrealistic, and then she lost access to the Picassa stuff. I don't know whether that actually got resolved.
Very badly run at every level. The most frustrating thing is, they had a guy writing about this who was apparently in some kind of leadership role, and he talked about how the appeals process should work and how the name stuff should work... And nothing he said actually had any influence on the behavior of the product. The actual appeals process consisted of a thing that did not include any mechanism at all for stating your case or explaining why you felt a given name was the right name to use for you, which was then ignored by a machine or possibly a person, who knows. That's it. No mechanism for response or interaction.
Google's hatred of actually dealing with things personally interacted very badly with a policy which was inherently personal.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Facebook is my address book for people I don't contact too often.
Gmail is where I write my email.
I don't need a social media website. It just happens that my address book has some kind of stupid social media BS tied in that I never use.
Same with Gmail. I might have actually used google wave if they had given it more than a couple of months to develop.
There ya go. Hi Sexconker! http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
Did you mean to post under your real name above? Seems kinda silly for a troll like you.
Sit back and watch Facebook turn to #2 in social networks.
I'd say they're #2 already... oh wait you meant second place. Never mind...
... they're only just now acknowledging that and putting the Plus corpse into the ground, now.
Passive-Aggressive user management is always the first step to a great fall and and epic fail.
Now that Google+ is being deprecated, can we please have the + search operator back, to indicate a +required_term in the search results?
Come on horse fuckers, G+ is not a failure.
With G+ I join communities and i get to see what's in those communities. I get posts in my feed that I actually want to see!
I don't get shit political noise can crap designed to agitate me. Nor do I get piles of crapvertisements disguised as part of my feed. so G+ is still a hell of a lot better than Fuckbook.
I've said it before, but I'll repeat it here: Google didn't know how to capture public interest at the time.
I remember when Google+ first appeared as an "invite only" service. That was just before Facebook made the huge blunder of putting members' profile photos in ads for any pages they "Liked," suggesting an endorsement. A lot of people everywhere got really angry at Facebook about "faces on ads," and even threatened to leave Facebook because of it.
That would have been a great opportunity to open up the Google+ service to everyone, seize the opportunity when people wanted to abandon Facebook. But Google+ remained invite-only. Only a few people could get new accounts.
Over the next week, pretty much all you saw in the news was how people wanted to leave Facebook because of the "faces on ads" thing. What an abuse of privacy! You're stealing my image to sell products! There were a bunch of petitions for Facebook to undo the new "faces on ads," or else they would delete their Facebook accounts. The only problem was that there wasn't a viable alternate social network out there. Twitter wasn't really a replacement for how most people used Facebook.
And Google+ still remained invite-only. By then, a few people I knew had accounts, but had run out of invites to share. So few others could get in.
After a few weeks, Facebook decided to calm the storm, and undid "faces on ads." And as expected, people stopped freaking out about Facebook. After another week, even the tech websites stopped writing about "faces on ads."
And finally, Google+ went "live." Anyone could join. I had an account, but few of my other friends bothered to sign up. Why? Because they were still using Facebook, they got over the "faces on ads" fiasco. Without other people to share with, Google+ failed to gain critical mass.
Google+ failed because they didn't know how to respond to the opportunity that Facebook gave them.
G+ is a thriving community. But what ever some blogger or some tech site that don't want to give it a chance says believe them. I wouldn't doubt that FB pays for these to be written.
Some great reasons as to why G+ never took off, but something I haven't seen mentioned is that the interface was a pig.
Go ahead. Go open it up and time how long the damn thing takes to load up. I have a fairly quick computer and it took over 10 seconds for first load ( around 8 seconds for each subsequent load ). On top of that, it loads my hangouts list again; I already have it in my browser and my email tab.
I am constantly amazed how frequently big companies completely screw up the interface thinking it's not important.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Like it, hate it, or be indifferent to it - your choice. But don't lie about it and claim that it is a total failure at this point. It does still exist, and people still post to it. Just because people don't jump to it with updates every femtosecond on which coffee shop has the best bathroom or other such useless bullshit doesn't mean it has failed.
And really, if anyone should know failure, it's slashdot. This site is vastly closer to 100% complete failure than google plus has ever been. For those who didn't see it last week, slashdot is up for sale, again. I suspect DHI might have change for a $20 if you want to make an offer; unfortunately you'll need to buy sourceforge in the same offer which is worth vastly more.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I'll have you know, we Facebook refuseniks have equal scorn for Google+.
What evidence is there really of a fall? I know that some media love to bash Google+, and love to proclaim it dead (they've done so since at least 2012), but is Google+ usage actually dropping meaningfully? As far as I can tell, it's as popular as ever among its users, despite Google's attempts to fuck it up.
The fact that Google is going to revert the disastrous Youtube integration is a good thing; the quality of content on Google+ (always its strongest point) can only go up. Google needs to recognize that they've got something that's really good just on its own. There's no need to fuck it up by shoehorning other stuff into it.
I believe G+ is a decent enough product.
If Google would simply reduce the staff considerably and make signup optional, then they could reduce their expectations and let it live or die on its own merit.
It isn't like there is a going to be a 2.0 or some huge new feature in this space. There is no need to invest heavily.
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
Almost everything from Google is Beta. It is subject to spurious cancellation, hard tacks in direction it is going in, and rarely is "finished" as such.
I avoid most Google things for this reason alone, there is a better chance they will lose interest and kill it than not. It is not clear to me what, if anything, is subject to long term support.
Compounding this is their invite only launches. They build huge buzz, then turn away people who want in. By time they open it up to more people I have forgotten why I was excited in the first place (Google Glass, their phone service with funky data plan, etc). If they want to sell a product, sell it. If you want to provide a service, provide it. Betas should be done quietly under an NDA, not with trumpeting press releases.
Like it, hate it, or be indifferent to it - your choice. But don't lie about it and claim that it is a total failure at this point. It does still exist, and people still post to it. Just because people don't jump to it with updates every femtosecond on which coffee shop has the best bathroom or other such useless bullshit doesn't mean it has failed.
Quite the contrary, in fact. That people don't post such meaningless garbage is one of the main reasons behind the high quality of content on Google+.
unfortunately you'll need to buy sourceforge in the same offer which is worth vastly more.
Is it still? I thought the new owners were eagerly working on ruining it.
The fact you're forced to tie everything to your Google+ profile with YouTube, Google play, and other services just sucked!
. . . and is made immeasurably worse by the real name policy. If you want me to participate in an online community in a lasting and meaningful way, there's no way in hell I'm using my real name.
Even worse, Google tried to confuse the issue (i.e. talk out of both sides of its mouth) by drawing a practically meaningless distinction between your "real" name and your common" name. See, your common name is "the name that you commonly go by in daily life," as opposed to your real name which is . . . fuck if I know. IMO, it was intentional double speak so they could claim "it's not actually a real name policy" whenever convenient.
Add to that at least one false start of rescinding the policy (is this one for real? Who knows?), and it's no wonder most of the internet judged them no more trustworthy (and of course potentially more dangerous) than Facebook. Now they claim they're de-coupling g+ from all their services. How many people think they've had any change of heart vs. thinking (as I've seen expressed here) they've found some other sneaky way to "link" you across their services?
Slashdot, I am sick of your BS... hopefully after the sale, this troublemakers get axed, and we can get back to having discussions founded on useful arguments.
After adhering to Buzz and being suddenly abandoned by Google... after having an incredible information tool like GoogleReader destroyed for G+ sake... why in the world would we invest any time using G+ and trust it would be around? Never again... We boycott stupid clouds ;)
For myself, email is the social network for those that refuse to use Facebook.
I am on twitter, but that is more news aggregation than social media. At least for myself. I know one of my followers. I happen to follow them as well. less than 10 posts a year for them.
Back when people were really hating Facebook's draconian "real name" policy, Google plus had a real opportunity to differentiate itself by allowing anonymity. In fact, at the very outset, there was much excitement about that possibility. Such a move would have garnered goodwill and lots of buzz in the beginning. Unfortunately, Google decided to make their real name policy as bad or worse than facebook's which killed any buzz they might have gotten and eliminated their competitive advantage. There was no reason to switch. Google did finally loosen the restrictions, but way too late. It was a fatal mistake.
William Shatner killed google+ for me, when he signed up to it, google shut down his email account without any checks, leaving him with no recourse, and no email. Who wants to risk that? http://www.businessinsider.com...
What made me mad is that G+ killed Google Reader, a product that was very good but wasn't thought as mass market as it had a small following, at least for Google standards.
Advanced Twitter is a good way of putting it. It's basically Twitter without all the needless restrictions, plus a way to have actual conversations.
I actually prefer the circles model, I can post adult things without my parents and children seeing, geeky stuff that the Mrs doesn't want to see, etc. The granular audience works better for me. The communities tend to be fairly stable and spam free
~corporate tool, but employed~
To me, Facebook is about people I care about, GooglePlus is about things I care about. Facebook sucks for discussing my eclectic amusements. My family really doesn't care about my Ingress activities, and my Ingress friends don't want to see kitty pictures.
Or to put it another way, GooglePlus filters out all the things I don't care about, nicely.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Like it, hate it, or be indifferent to it - your choice. But don't lie about it and claim that it is a total failure at this point. It does still exist, and people still post to it. Just because people don't jump to it with updates every femtosecond on which coffee shop has the best bathroom or other such useless bullshit doesn't mean it has failed.
Quite the contrary, in fact. That people don't post such meaningless garbage is one of the main reasons behind the high quality of content on Google+.
That is pretty much my point. I don't exist on facebook - I am told repeatedly I am the last such person in the world - because I don't care about trivial bullshit that people I haven't spoken with in decades have to say about places I don't wish to see. I am on google+, and indeed I do prefer the content there.
unfortunately you'll need to buy sourceforge in the same offer which is worth vastly more.
Is it still? I thought the new owners were eagerly working on ruining it.
Well, it is rather hard to be worth less than slashdot after what has happened here in the past 5-10 years.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Do you seriously think it's even him anymore, now that he's outed himself?
I use both G+ and FB, and they are different for me.
Facebook is a morass of annoying acquaintances sprinkled among family and friends. I rarely post there.
G+ is a much more interesting community for me.
Yes, my choices make each site different. FB is where most of my family is, so it also has a loft of noise, and i filter it.
So I use both.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
If Google+ is such a failure, why won't they get rid of it. The vast majority of the community don't like. Especially irksome is the tie-in to YouTube. I expect NSA doesn't want Google to change their policy regardless of their lack of success so I don't expect it to sunset anytime soon.
Is no one going to question what will happen to site pageranks when google+ is retired? They forced us to create google+ accounts in order to rank better (or at least equal to) competitors. Now what?
I thought for sure this would be the single biggest issue for slashdotters. I guess times really have changed here.
Assuming you're not SexConker ... Seems like an even bet. Reviewing his/her post history, there are a couple of additional "Moo Moo yada yada" posts that make light of the ongoing thing s/he's doing. And totally ignoring the slip-up.
Haters gonna hate, trolls gonna troll.
I don't blame Google for trying. There are too many variables to say what will work and won't. Social networking is too big of an industry to not bother making a play for. Honda started out a successful motorbike company, and successfully pushed into automobiles even though that industry was full of established players.
However, I do blame Google for forcing their services to be or act like a social networking site, where private info magically showed up elsewhere in unexpected ways. That's just desperation and/or forceful denial in play, ticking off your user base. They forgot "Don't Be Evil". Obsession made them stupid.
I hope Google goes back to what it does well: lots of specialized little services that can OPTIONALLY share info between each other as the user sees fit.
Table-ized A.I.
I'll have you know, we Facebook refuseniks have equal scorn for Google+.
Speak for yourself. I refuse to use Facebook, but quite like Google+. I also have a Twitter account, which I never use. But I dumped Facebook the second or third time they changed my privacy settings without asking me, and have no intention of every going back.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
They were trying too hard to outdo Facebook in the advertising and privacy invasion and not outdoing Facebook in anything that people actually want.
And the logical result of this kind of behavior is that management is now going to have to bite the bullet and actually acquire someone else's social network. Twitter and LinkedIn seem like the obvious choices, but does Google have 50 billion USD to spare?
Dear Google,
I'm sorry you've had acceptance issues (first with Buzz and now Plus) but I say "Keep on trying; the third time is the charm!"
Lost of Love,
(afraid to use my real name)
I agree with you. though seeing as you are at a 0 right now, I guess its not ok to say that you dislike facebook, twitter, and google+ equally.
I don't use it any of it. I think it has been a net positive in my life with many benefits. And this is from seeing friends and family get roped into the nonsense that is social networking.
Also, its not social media. It's social networking.
Something like reddit is really closer to "social media" as they aggregate real information from real media sources and primarily discuss those stories.
It obviously failed because Google didn't migrate Google+ to systemd. Let that be a lesson to Facebook and Twitter, if they don't switch to systemd, the same fate awaits them.
You can't just be equal, you can't just be good, you must be better..MUCH better..an order of magnitude better.. night vs day better
Google+ was kinda as good as Facebook..maybe
The inertia (and pain) of switching from Facebook..and convincing ALL of your friends to switch from Facebook was too high a bar
Doesn't facebook still require you to post to all your friends rather than grouping your "friends" into subsets?
Well, I happen to like Google+ and the Circles concept ( I wish it didn't only apply to people ). But I've always disliked Facebook. I use Google+ more like a scrapbook ( I also like Pinterest ). Since Facebook is practically ubiquitous (but probably peaked and beginning to decline?), Google needs an approach that is much more long-term. In fact, its much too early to be thinking it has failed. I do hope they keep a strong team working on it.
What happened to William Shatner was a huge error. Had it not been reversed, that one policy would have guaranteed Google+ would never be ubiquitous.
... that I am not everybody and don't have a facebook account. My social media is out there in the street!
I use G+ because hangouts are a part of it and I can talk to my sister in Australia. I also use circles to exchange with various groups of people - friends, family...
realkiwi
My biggest gripe with Google + is the same gripe I have with most Google services; you get stuck with all of their services once you sign up for one. I had to remove my Google+ account three times because every so often Google would recreate it. I only use a gmail account as a junk mail account, but people keep finding me on youtube and drive even though i do not use them. Now that I have an android phone I can'tell seem to get rid of the extra accounts.
Google+ to me is an annoying thing that steals conversations from Youtube. You mean it's something in itself? What?
It lacked the false sense of privacy that Facebook gives. I think that may be one part of what caused people to sway away from it. I'm personally a fan of G+. It's got no ads, more powerful tools, no false sense of privacy, and it has a better layout. It also interfaces with my other Google apps nicer. I wish more people would have given it a fair chance, like they gave to Facebook when MySpace was still a thing.
For me, Google+ was never edifying, and always left me with an impression of poor performance and confusing UI.
It became akin to Kerberos for the purposes of branding Google products and reviews. Which is fine, and I can see how that's nice, because I get to tell my network of contacts about stuff that I think is good or bad. That's a good problem to solve, if done correctly. (Want "reviews?" Go to a place where reviews are found.)
What Google REALLY doesn't seem to get is the idea of categorical presentation of information. I don't want a mishmash of videos, pictures, advertisements, articles, etc. Instead, I have this nagging element in my window whenever I'm trying to do work, telling me that people "putting me in their circles."
You know what that is? Inefficient and distracting. Irritating. Annoying. My experience with Google+ is one where I go through and keep "blocking" and "banning" fake identities or unknown entities who "put me in their circle."
Whatever.
Also, dear Google: Stop creating confusing UI. Your products have become incredibly difficult to understand.
http://www.nagaiah.com/home.ph...
> That was always the problem that myspace and then facebook were able to leverage, they got pretty young women on there early.
No kidding, they should have called it "Duckfacebook." :)